WOOFING AND WEEPING: The State of Research, or No One Knows But God

ANIMALS AND ETHICSIn much of his late work, Jacques Derrida characterized the question of the animal as "not one question among others" but the question that "represents the limit upon which all the great question are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence and future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity. ‘genocide,’ etc." The humanism that utterly divides humans from animals is a legacy of the Christian Middle Ages; consequently, the Middle Ages is an ideal site for exploring the development of the modern concept of the human. It is also, however, a place in which other possibilities for human/animal relationship might be discovered. When and where is anthropocentrism suspended? Such moments might be discovered in hunting practices, chivalry, various literary texts--Chaucer's Squire's Tale, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, traditions of the "hairy saint"--and medieval theology and philosophy (from either Christian or non-Christian traditions), all of which might productively be used to think through, for example, the phenomenological ethics of Ralph Acampora, the assemblages of humans, animals, and objects in Deleuze and Guattari, and even perhaps the responsibility promoted by Levinas, despite his indifference to the question of animals.

On with the show! Several weeks ago, I discussed stumbling upon the weeping of animals in Ava's version of the 15 Signs of the Last Judgment. In response to Eileen's request that I clarify my interest in this scene, I wrote (slightly edited):

Given the profound anthropocentricism of sacred history--since however much God or Creation matters, God and Creation matter only insofar as they serve humankind--any acknowledgment of other lives is always in excess of what is required. Animal life should not rate; after all, they have no share in the afterlife, there's no friendship possible with them, they can be the recipient of only indirect duties, &c. I think here of Heidegger's conviction that animals, in their total captivation in their world and thus their total inability to relate to the future, can only "perish," that they cannot die [since writing this, I've discovered some roots of Heidegarrian animal thinking in Schopenhauer, who wrote "indeed the brutes do not properly speaking feel death" and "between the brute and the external world there is nothing, but between us and the external world there is always our thought about it"]

Yet in Ava we have several stanzas concerned solely with disruptions to animal life. We can conceive of these stages of the 15 signs as a systematic undoing of creation (hence the fish first, then fowl, then beasts of the field), and hence as moving in a trajectory towards the human. Nevertheless, Ava--and I hope not only Ava--marks the suffering of animals as a particular suffering in creation. It's not simply that the mountains are falling, the seas turning to blood, freshwater is turning bitter, and all the other business from John's Apocalypse.

Instead, in excess of what is strictly necessary for her project, which nowhere else pays much attention to animals, Ava acknowledges the lives and deaths and passions of animals. And she acknowledges the relations of animals with each other. Her acknowledgment does not redeem animals, but I'd say that the fact that animals cannot be redeemed increases the interest. We might say that we see zoē--mere life--and "animal sacer" given what they should lack: a voice, a sadness, rage, a death that matters, even at the very moment when their deaths, in a sense, matter least of all (since they're not being sacrificed anymore to human appetite or instrumentality). And we might say that this is not "given" but is rather revealed. At the very moment humans pass into redemption, at the very moment when their lives are marked for eternity as the only lives that 'really matter,' we see--maybe!--the catastrophe of human indifference to animal life. Sacrificed life, a life only as means, speaks and reveals itself as what it was all along, as life, as an end in itself, but only at the moment of its destruction. This is the one moment, the only moment, when animal life is for itself.

To this I'll add that we see a grief that cannot be sacrificed. Whatever the fear of humans during the last 15 days, their fear will be exchanged for something, whether heaven or hell; but whatever the fear--or love, in fact--of animals, they ultimately get nothing for it. Certainly the fear of animals has been put on display for humans, since, insofar as it astonishes humans, since insofar as it's being expressed in a particular genre with a particular purpose, it is being sacrificed to the generation of proper human piety; but this is not all there is. My argument--and this, I hope, begins to answer Nicola's complicated comment on the previous post--may include: a) that animals are shown to experience more fully than humans the injustice of the end of hope and dread; b) that animals do in fact get closer than humans to the Great Impossibility, namely, the experience of their own deaths, since, after all, humans, even in dying, leap over their own deaths into eternal life.I knew that the fifteen signs were a medieval Christian commonplace, but I was also nervous that Ava's attention to animals would be the only place animals received any notice. Time spent with William W. Heist's The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (Michigan State College Press, 1952) and in the meagerness of Brooklyn College's library (would whoever moved The Prick of Conscience please put it back where it belongs?) dispersed all my worries. Here's some of what I discovered:

Heist argues that the Irish Saltair na Rann is the most important source for the transmission of the 15 signs: there are a few references to animals in it, but as I can't even fake Old Irish, and since Heist offers his translation as provisional, I'm just marking this wellspring and moving on;

the pseudo-Bede, from the PL (provided in Heist, with a translation): "Quarta die pisces et omnes belluae marinae, et congregabuntur super aquas, et dabunt voces et gemitus, quarum significationem nemo scit nisi Deus." "On the fourth day the fishes and all the sea monsters will both gather together upon the waters and give forth voices and groans, whose meaning no one knows but God." (25);

Peter Damian's De novissimis et Antichristo (warning: PDF): "The sign of the fourth day: all the monsters and all things that live in the water of the sea will be gathered together upon the sea, roaring and bellowing back and forth as though in contest; and men will not know what they are singing or what they are thinking, but only God will know, by whom all live that His purpose may be fulfilled. These four signs are of the sea, and the next three signs are of the air and ether. The sign of the fifth day: flying creatures of all heaven will assemble in the fields, every kind in its order; these birds will be speaking and weeping together, fearing the coming of the Judge...The sign of the ninth day: all the stones, both small and great, will be split into four parts, and each part will strike the other part, and no man will understand that sound, but only God [this included in the quotation because I thought it might interest Jeffrey]....The sign of the twelfth day: all the beasts of the earth will come from the woods and mountains to the fields roaring and bellowing, not eating and not drinking" (Heist trans, 28).

As I expected, the 15 signs appear frequently in Middle English, and the four or five references that I've examined so far tend to include references to animals. Two examples. In the "Quindecim Signa ante diem Judicii" (ed. in Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ EETS OS 23, 118-25) all creation cries out:

To forestall any memory work by medieval drama specialists: I did find the reference in the Chester "Antichrist's Prophets," where one of the Expositor's several references to animals runs "All manner of beastes shall rore and crye / and neyther eate nor drynke" (ll. 321-4)

Now, if you're still with me, I want to point out that animals are not the only grieving elements of creation. In an Anglo-Norman version, "the stars fall from heaven and run about the earth like lightning; they shed tears and run under the mountain; they turn black and plunge into the abyss....the moon turns to blood, descends, and tries to run into the sea....all the rivers speak and cry to God for mercy" (28-29, Heist's summary: I haven't examined the original yet). However, my research so far suggests that crying stars and pleading rivers are less common compared to crying and pleading animals. Surely it's easier to imagine an animal crying than a star; and most traditions of the 15 Signs do not include weeping stars, which surely matters in an eschatological tradition whose content remained--remarkably?--stable throughout its life. I'm justified, then, in concentrating on animals, but, at the same time, I thought some of our posthuman ITMers might want to know about the stars, just as they might want to know about the "battling rocks" (debellabunt petrae adinvicem) of pseudo-Bede.

We'll see where this takes me! Hopefully to Kzoo 2009. Suggestions and comments are, of course, encouraged.

14 comments:

peggy mccracken
said...

Karl, I don't know if this will interest you or not, it's kind of random. After reading your first post on the 15 signs, I noticed this description of ms Paris BN fr 2168, end 13c, summary description in Tobin's edition of Les lais anonymes: ms includes 21 different texts, among them: "...li lais de Gugemer,...chi commenche li Bestiaires (Fables), les 15 Signes, li drois Bestiaires de la jeune Escripture, ...."I haven't seen the ms and I don't know what's in the "15 Signes" text, but I wonder if the order of the texts (les 15 Signes between two other animal texts) could suggest that a scribe or compiler might have been thinking, like you, about the animals...?

Peggy, that's great, and, yes, evocative. I just ordered the Tobin through ILL: I hope it helps me track down an edition of that particular 15 Signes (esp. as it escaped the attention of Heist...or his indexer). A bit of googling on that ms informs that that it also has Aucussin and Nicolette, Du bouchier d'Abevile (which I don't know), and a Bataille de Carême et de Charnage: we could say, then, that. with its butchers, its fighting sausages, and the foodfight in Auc&Nic, the ms is interested in animals AND meatfood.

One might argue that what is happening to the animal at doomsday is homologous to what Lippit argues happens to the animal in film in Electric Animal--a suspension of temporality which grants voice and death to the animal (cf. hegel's every animal finds a voice in death).

I am so enthralled by this, Karl. You know that for a long time "medieval noise" has more or less obsessed me, and here we see (or hear) even rocks make a sound that has meaning ... but only to God. You know, these lists begin to sound so much like accounts of the Tower of Babel, with each individual species (race) speaking in a tongue that announces that universal communication has been lost, and that only God now understands the noise of the world. It's like Babel II, but in preparation for union rather than scattering .... and as you point out, Karl, what we're hearing are the sounds of those things and beings that will have no place in the new community. How melancholic is that? It's like having all your friends vanish at the Rapture and there's you left on lonely earth. I think this does connect (not directly, but somewhat) to the post i did on the World Without Us, only here we see a world slowly emptying itself of its contents in preparation for humanity's departure.

Oh yes, and maybe I've overplayed the grief: who knows if the rocks are mourning at their own self division? Their noise is untranslatable, and so the only emotion here is that felt by the (human) reader, deprived of access to the signification of the language of the stones.

These two species of birds (turtle doves and doves) do not sing like other birds, but they moarn; because they signify the mourning of holy men in this life, like Christ said to his apostles, "You will be sad in this life, but your sadness will be turned to eternal joy."]

Two more crying animals! Geomerian is to cry aloud, modern Dutch 'jammeren' (link to yammer?).

Karl, as I read your post from O'Hare awaiting my flight to London, I can't help but think of the opening book of Gower's Vox clamantis. Well, maybe that's because I've been doing so much writing on it the last two years, and giving another paper on it next week at the big Gower conference in Southwark. That Gower's dream vision structure trades on the apocalyptic isn't necessarily earth-shattering, but I do think it's been obscured out of an overwhleming (and sometimes misplaced) interest in the few passages where Gower deals with the 1381 Rising. My paper next week focuses on the passages of liquidity, passages that I found strikingly resonant with the 15 signs tradition -- about which I new nothing, and appreciate your drawing my attention to it. Anyway, your might want to take a peak at Gower. Maria Wickert, whose defining work on the Vox is too often cited but not read, discusses, among other issues, the connections between Gower's text and medieval sermons. Just a thought.

Nicola, first, thanks for the reminder about Lippit. On its face, I'm inclined to say that the animals are not experiencing/shown to be experiencing a suspension of temporality (although I'd have to review Lippit's argument to know if I'm mangling his thought or not). Rather, I'd say they're, as they do so often, experiencing the deaths that humans, at least in mainstream medieval Christian doctrine (hereafter MMCD), never do. Only animals experience--or suffer--the complete breakdown of the body, only they have--if this can be called a 'having'--the sheer vulnerability of life that cannot be exchanged for anything else (including memories, since, after all, who remembers--who memorializes--slaughtered pigs? This gets at my SEMA paper). Can we say that time is being suspended in any way in this moment? I'm not sure, so I'd love to hear more from you on this point. For now, I'm inclined to think that the future ends, and with it, time itself. That complete end marks it, I think, as something other than a suspension. MMCD splits the import of that terminus in two: the end of the future as the end of world and hence the end of self belongs--with the proviso about 'having' marked again--only to animals, whereas the end of future as the end of the threat of the future (that is, that time and our names will persist without us) belongs only to humans.

Jeffrey, thanks as well (and THANKS to Letty and Nic too!). I've finally ordered the Valerie Allen book, and I suppose I should read all of the Exemplaria medieval noise cluster. You now have me wondering how much I should make of the distinction between versions of the 15 signs that reference God's singular knowledge of the meaning and those that leave out even that comfort of resolvability. As I said above, it's a very traditional genre, which means, I think, that I should assume minimal PURPOSE to any individual variation--it's much safer, I think, to assign the differences to happenstance transmission issues rather than individual/institutional/cultural (wherever we draw our lines) deliberation. Now, do we call this "god only knows" a "comfort"--it CAN be interpreted--or an anxious marking of the ungraspability of meaning: God, after all, isn't going to tell anyone what the sounds mean. He hears their grief, their wailing, and still destroys them. This approach is on my mind because I was listening to the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows," which--surprisingly--captures some of the melancholy, uncertain eschatology and deathsense that I'm seeing in the animals of this tradition:

I may not always love youBut long as there are stars above youYou never need to doubt itI'll make you so sure about it

God only knows what I'd be without you

If you should ever leave meThough life would still go on believe meThe world could show nothing to meSo what good would living do me?

God only knows what I'd be without you

Lettty, thanks very much for that reference. The getacniað troubles me, however. I normally go out of my way to avoid animal allegory: my preference has been for creatures like the Donestre, who--for what reason?--mourn over the bodies of the people they kill, just as the harpies do in The Branches of the Appletree (ed. in The Tretyse of Love, J. H. Fischer, EETS OS 223):

"Vpon this braunche [compunction] makith hir neest a byrde whiche is callid harpia, that hath the semblaunce of a mannes visage, & hir nature is to slee the fyrst man she fyndeth, & thenne gooth she to some water where she beholdeth hirself & seeth that she hath slayn hir owne liknes, & thenne makyth she a full grete sorowe alwaye that euer she sawe ony man. This signefyeth þe soule that slew cryst by hir synne, whose semblaunce is in hir, for to his semblaunce was she created" (113).

I love this UNTIL we get to the "signefyeth."

But responding to your comment has forced me to rethink some of this. The "signefyeth," "getacniað," "significavit" shuts things down, but rather than focus on that moment, I should focus instead--as I've been doing in my 15 signs thinking--on why animals included at all. In part this is a 'why are animals good to think with' question, and the answer to that is, in part, Jeffrey's observations (in On Difficult Middles and in his essay in the Engaging with Nature anthology) about animals as apt sites of fantasy, as places to dream other lives. So, in part I want to mark, with you Letty, that Aelfric knows these birds mourn, and then to wonder why Aelfric should be interested in this.

Similarly, Nic, THANK you. I've largely avoided the Gowther because of its allegory. But you've suggested a useful way to come at things, and, no, I've NEVER thought of the 15 signs connection to it: right now, I'm inclined to think it's tenuous, but, who knows? I'll have another look.

Karl: this is a very rich and provocative post. I am just back from Leeds and have actually been quite ill for about a week now, so I'm little slow to get to this conversation, but I definitely wanted to note/comment on a couple of things:

1. as the theme of the Leeds Congress this year was "The Natural World," you would not *believe* how many papers were devoted to topics of animals and animality. I kept writing "tell Karl" in the margins next to so many sessions that I finally thought, "oh fuck it, just send Karl the whole program." Then, in typical spacy Eileen Joy fashion, I lost my program (or rather, left it in a pub). But the entire program is available online here:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2008.html

I would say that it would be a great idea to peruse this program and see if you can squeeze copies of papers out of some of the presenters.

2. It's not entirely accurate to say that Levinas was indifferent to the question of the animal. I would say he approached it both indirectly [in "Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority"] and more directly [in "Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence"]. Also, I wonder if you would allow me to say that, since his magnum opus [in my, and I think, also, Derrida's opinion] "Totality and Infinity" was obsessed with exteriority, and which he noted was "not a negation, but a marvel," that his ethical thought, either wittingly or unwittingly, opens an important site for "thinking the animal"? So, in "Totality and Infinity," we have:

"The very status of the human implies fraternity and the idea of the human race. Fraternity is radically opposed to the conception of a humanity united by resemblance, a multiplicity of diverse families arisen from the stones cast behind by Deucalion, and which, across the struggle of egoisms, results in a human city." [p. 214]

"Being *is* not *first*, to afterwards, by breaking up, give place to a diversity all of whose terms would maintain reciprocal relations among themselves, exhibiting thus the totality from which they proceed, and in which there would on occasion be produced a being existing for itself, and I, facing another I. . . . Separation is first the fact of a being that lives *somewhere*, from *something*, that is, that enjoys. . . . The other . . . leaves room for a process of being that is deduced from itself, that is, remains separated and capable of shutting itself up against the very appeal that has aroused it." [pp. 215-16]

In the idea above of "separation" as "the fact of a being that lives *somewhere*, from *something*, that is, that enjoys," I see the beginning of a rapprochement between Levinas and your thinking [or desire] for the "discovery" of "other possibilities for human/animal relationship," as well as for the suspension of anthropocentrism in an analysis of the animals of the "Fifteen Signs" texts.

More explicitly [as regards the animal and animlaity], in "Otherwise Than Being," we have, unfortunately, the idea of "animality" as "the soul's still being too short of breath" [placed within an excursus on the "breathing of outside air" in order to delineate the passivity of a subject that "could be a lung at the bottom of its substance," p. 180]. But I wonder if we can't read the animal into Levinas's thinking on passive subjectivity and the aymmetrical relation with exteriority in a way that might recuperate the question of the animal from what you term Levinas's indifference? On the other hand, given the religious nature of Levinas's thought, and the medieval Christian nature of your subject matter here . . . maybe not [while at the same time, I also read your project here as an attempt to suspend--within the very Christian text itself--its own Christianity, so to speak, its own subtle or not so subtle attempts to foreclose the possibilities of different animal/human relationships. This to me, in any case, is the most interesting aspect of your project, since it speaks to something I really believe in, pace Deleuze and Guttauri, that,

"the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it's capable, if it can)."

And as our interpreter here, you, Karl, would be the "conjugater" of "deterritorialized [animal/human] flows."

Karl: I also have one small, niggling caution. In your attempt to argue that,

"a) that animals are shown to experience more fully than humans the injustice of the end of hope and dread; b) that animals do in fact get closer than humans to the Great Impossibility, namely, the experience of their own deaths, since, after all, humans, even in dying, leap over their own deaths into eternal life,"

please be careful not to reinscribe the very animal/human binary you are working so hard to suspend.

Thanks for your Levinas material. My characterization of Levinas and animals derives primarily from Derrida's characterization of L.--although, to be sure, D's animal ethics would be impossible w/out Levinas--and from two places in his own work: the short piece about the dog Bobby, 'the last Kantian in Nazi Germany,' and an interview where he asserts that evolution split humans entirely from animals. This work has been worked over a lot in theoretical animal circles, BUT--given your intervention here--I think the time is right to see what of Levinas can be salvaged for animals. Indeed, you're the second person to call attention to the breathing stuff in Levinas (the first being an anonymous reviewer of a grant proposal, and thank you, whoever you were, anon.).

In re your caution: oh, that's not me saying that. That's my analysis of the structure of MMCD (mainstream medieval Christian doctrine), where I'm convinced, now, that humans don't actually die, and that they look to animals for a display of the full reality--if not the full experience--of death that Christianity denies, given its fundamental belief in human immortality and in death's exchangeability, either for heaven or hell. Here I think, for example, of the wistful meditation on the finality of animal death in the Knight's Tale, mentioned by Jeffrey in his "Inventing with animals in the MA" essay...although since the afterlife of ancient pagans is sort of uncertain, I wonder if there's a kind of animal quality of the relation to death of Pal. and Arc. and their ilk??

Arcite's death is certainly death as bodily death, as an event taking the self *who knows where*, calling it into question. Cf. a couple related comments on No Country for Old Men.

Lippit's argument (as I understand it from articles that led into his book) is not really that animals experience death/temporality/world/whatever on film, but that film is a place where we give animals mortality in the human sense. Film thus follows the logic of the pet, the fetish. And he therefore also develops the continuities between "animal" and "animation." Cf. the end of Bresson's Balthazar which clearly confronts this issue, which I find easiest to explain via acting. Animals do not act (supposedly), at least they do not act in our dramas, fictions, myths they way we humans do, as conscious agents *of* them. Because of this the animal breaks the fabric of fiction, narrative in certain ways, its very presence constituting an extra-narrative realilty, and thus also an authenticating power. Cf. animals as testimony to the sacred in hagiography.

About animal temporality, I am interested, in light of Aquinas's argument about animal hope, that time might here be the term in regard to which animals are sensing and expressing something that is happening to the world, or rather, to world itself, the *removal* of which gives animals voice.

But it all depends on what we are really up to in questioning this text. Do we want to squeeze it for a (true) statement we would like to make about animal/human nature? Do we want it to testify to a certain historical/cultural logic? Probably both. But now that I have thought a few more minutes about it, I would also want to emphasize the importantce of the irreducibility and unintelligibility of the animals' woofing and weeping at the world's ending, and thus the limitations of *explanation*, MMCD apocalypse being very much about the spectacle of what exceeds, especially human, knowing.

Karl: thanks for that elaboration on your argument, which I completely understand, although, having also read Nicola's latest comment, I wonder if your argument isn't also trying to do two things: both reveal the cultural/historical logic at work in the text while also ruminating the possibilities of a different reading that *suspends* these logics?

I can't believe I forgot Levinas's "Kantian dog" but since I just read about that 3 days ago [!] in the London airport in a book by Howard Caygill, "Levinas and the Political" [excellent book, by the way].

Karl, Just a quick note from London before heading to Swansea. Given the rich conversation about Derrida and Levinas, esp. Eileen's commentary on Levinas's notions of fraternity, I wonder if another theoretical resource for you might Jean-Luc Nancy, who is becoming more important in my own work. He seems an untapped resource for medievalists to think about and through a range of issues about Christianity/religion, embodiment, community, and being. Similarly, he often seems to function as a nice bridge between Derrida/Levinas and Deleuze. As you're probably aware, Derrida wrote critically, but loving, about his friend Nancy not only in "Le Toucher" but also in "Rogues," where the latter includes a series of interrogations of Nancy's concern with community and fraternity, allowing Derrida to once again posit his "community without community." I'll try to post more about Nancy at a latter date, as I'm also trying to start my own blog (we'll see; I'm still new to this idea).